A few notes from Drupalcamp Arad 2012

I’m back from Drupalcamp Arad 2012. Though i was before in Arad, i still remained a little bit surprized how beautiful the city-center can look in the evenings.

But let’s talk about the event. It was organized in a professional manner and i think that that was one of its strongest points. It took place at Continental Forum Hotel Arad at the topmost floor from where you could have quite a nice view over the city. At the registration i collected my Drupalcamp bag, t-shirt, badge and a can of Red Bull. It’s beyond me why would anyone offer such a drink when there is coffee available. Usually a strong coffee has more caffeine then a can of Red Bull and at least we know for centuries that its healthy.

About the sessions. Yes… there were quite a few presentations, maybe a little bit too many. I would have made the Drupalcamp only 1 day long but with very good presentations. Now i don’t want to say that the subjects were poor. There were quite some interesting subjects but the presentation of some was really poor. You can’t just read from the slides like a machine because half of the room will be asleep before you reach the half of your session.

I understand that some people were at their first presentation but still, i would expect from a presenter (especially if he didn’t present before) to at least rehearse the presentation once before. There are also other points but i will not go into details, if anyone interested then Dmitry Dulepov has here some really good tips on how to give the best presentation.

But there were also some very good presentations. I liked best the presentation “Cloud to the rescue” presented by Alexandru Badiu and then the “Case Study: The Spiral. European transmedia project powered by Drupal, Node.js and MongoDB” presented by Koen Van Isterdael. The highlight of the second day was the presentation about Drupal 8 made by Claudiu Cristea.

The social event Saturday night was held at Club Nerv and was a big success. People even sang some songs as a karaoke contest was organized. I’ve met some people, even some from Cluj so i think overall the event was useful.